Up Against It - M. J. Locke [127]
Ouroboros spun around its narrow axis, a barbell shape that slowly brightened and dimmed, like a giant beating heart, as it tumbled. He smiled at the familiar sight—and then frowned. Something was off. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something about the pattern of rotation seemed different.
It might have just been hit by another big rock. A big enough stroid would change its contours or rotation, and it had certainly been clobbered many times before. Geoff shut off his rockets, to make it easier to zoom in, and Amaya and Kam passed him. He brought up his optical scope and focused on the big rock.
There! Rising on the horizon, along the narrowest section of the stroid, he saw a shape that had not been there before. A bright shape. A geometric one. A ship had landed on Ouroboros.
“What the hell?” He signaled Amaya and Kam, who were continuing to accelerate. “Shut off your rockets!”
Their flames died instantly. “What is it?” Amaya asked.
“Zoom on the rock. There’s a ship.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Kam said, after a pause. A brief silence followed as they all studied the shape that had not been there before. “Black marketers?”
Nobody replied.
“What are those numbers there, on the side?” Geoff asked. Kam had the best optics. “Can you read them?”
“Hang on. Yeah. Think I’ve got it.” He fed the numbers to Geoff, who put in a call to Sean Moriarty. The Stores chief took several minutes to answer; meanwhile, they drifted toward Ouroboros on their bikes.
“Moriarty here.”
“Sir, it’s Geoff. Geoff Agre.”
“I’m glad you called. The police are still waiting for you to go down to the precinct. They need you to give a statement about what happened last night with those black-market thugs.”
Geoff had forgotten about that. “We will, sir, as soon as we get back into town. But that’s not why I called. My friends and I”—he cleared his throat—“we seem to have a problem.”
“You seem to collect them.”
“That’s what people tell me, sir.”
Moriarty chuckled. Geoff hesitated. He did not want to remind anyone about his ice claim just now, but not doing so would be incredibly stupid.
“Well, spit it out!” Moriarty said. “If you need my help, I’ll do what I can. If not, I have other things that need doing.”
“Kam told you about my stroid. The one with the ice.”
“I remember. What about it?”
“Well, there are some people out here. A ship. I was afraid maybe it was the black marketers again.”
“You’re out there right now?”
“That’s right.”
A brief silence. “OK. What do you see?”
Geoff studied the image again. “A ship. Maybe a twelve-seater yacht. Maybe a shuttle. We’re not close enough to tell. It’s landed on my rock.”
“Have you got the ship registry number?”
“Yes.” Geoff fed it over the link.
“OK, got it. Hold on. Where’s Mitchell? You, get Mitch Shibata,” he called to someone on his end. “Tell him I need him right now. Double time! Hang on, Geoff, I’m going to do some quick checks. Don’t go offline.”
While they waited for Moriarty to get back, Kam linked the three of them up in wavespace, trained their three different perspectives on the shape, and plugged it into some app or another. The resulting magnified, three-dimensional image that hung in their shared wavespace was clearly a cargo ship. There was a marking in blue and gold—a corporate logo?—on the side.
“I am pretty sure,” Kam said, flicking through the images in sequence to show them the movements of some spots near the ship, “that those little dark spots are people wandering around on the surface.”
“Where are they with respect to the cave entrance?” Amaya asked.
“Close. About fifteen meters, maybe. Near the storage tanks.”
Which meant sneaking in would be difficult, if not impossible.
The remote comm light came on again, and Moriarty said into their shared space, “We’ve checked the logs. You should be fine. The university has sent out a team to survey the claim. You know Ngo Minh Xuan, Commissioner Navio’s husband?”
“I’ve met him,” Geoff said.
“He’s on the team. Everything looks to be on the up-and-up.”
A sick feeling sank in Geoff